Dr Carla Lipsig-Mummi published a very interesting article in The Age recently. Lipsig-Mummi clear identifies the importance of trade unions in effectively tackling climate change. Trade unions are source of people power which can be leveraged to force companies to introduce environmental best practice. However, the story of conflict between environmentalists and trade unionists in Australia has to this point been needlessly acrimonious. The Forestry Division of the CFMEU and anti-logging campaigners have been in constant trench warfare in Tasmania for the last generation. Social conscious union organisers deride environmentalists as hippies, while environmentalist activists are conditioned to see unions as part of the problem. Logging in Tasmania though is as much about the role and influence of capital in public life. The image reflected, however, is an Australian political culture where environmental protection and the creation of decent jobs is a zero-sum game.
The first signs are beginning to emerge that we are moving past this juvenille division between the two camps. Recently the CFMEU has been pressuring supermarket retailer, Woolworths, about the green credentials of its Select brand of toilet paper (manufactured in China). The CFMEU has successfully challenged the sustainability of the product, forcing Woolworths to change its labelling of the product, and commence looking for an alternative supplier. It is particularly significant that such an environmental push has come from the green movements union bogeyman; the CFMEU.
Some of our green comrades may simply write off the CFMEU’s conduct as comparable to any corporation; green only when it suits their immediate interests. I am not privy to the inner-workings of the CFMEU but it would be reasonable to suggest that the Woolworths campaign has been pushed partly due to securing the economic security of its members. However, there is something deeper going on.
The trade union movement and the environmentalist movement make essentially the same criticisms of the way that our politico-economic system currently operates. One of the fundamentals of unionism is that people deserve respect at work. People cannot and should not be commodified like goods such as apples and oranges. A free and floating price on labour would result in untold harm to workers, their families and the communities in which they live. Neither should people be treated like mere thinking machines which are ordered around in a totalitarian manner in the workplace. A person deserves respect and dignity everywhere in their life. In short, wage labour is not an article of freehold property which the owner can utilise and dispose of at their leisure.
From an ecological perspective on the other hand our environment should be accorded considerable respect too. Nature is too something which should not be left to the mercies of the capitalist system. A system of private ownership which requires constant economic growth for stability is ultimately detrimental to ecological sustainability. There comes a point in an enclosed system where the consumption of resources and the resulting pollution can no longer be sustained. There are just not simply the resources left to support the economy.
The capitalist system places working families on treadmill of acquisition, consumption and debt. Simultaneously exploiting workers and degrading the environment. While, the eternal debate goes on as to whether this can be fixed with reform or it requires a completely new politico-economic system is another matter. The point I am trying to get at is that the union movement and the green movement are really manifestations of the one counter-hegemonic movement. Each working together will assist the other.
The challenge is to take this common foundation and make tangible policy. My Sustainable Development Investment Bank is such an example, and the LaborStrategies blog also has a lot great material about the creation of green-collar jobs. What about you guys, do you have a different opinion about the relationship between the union movement and the environmental movement?
September 20, 2008 at 10:56 am |
I think you are on the right track – we need a working class, anti-capitalist movement to save us from global warming. What that means now is union-environmental links and socialist-left labor-green links. Campaigns, debates, joint actions, co-operation – to build a movement for policies, not to fight over positions. When will you come back to blogging?